"Which King Will You Serve?" 1 Samuel 7:15-8:22, Sulmane Maigadi

Good morning Church of the Resurrection.

If you are new, my name is Solmani Megadi.

I'm one of the pastors here. We have been in the book of

First Samuel these past few weeks and the 1st 7 chapters of

the book are set at a time when there was no king in Israel.

Everybody was doing what was right in their own eyes.

The book actually opens up with the birth of Samuel, who becomes

God's instrument for Israel's renewal.

But while Samuel is growing up in the temple in favor before

God, the priestly House of Eli is rotting with him.

Eli and his sons are sinning, and the people himself are

sinning. So God judges Eli's household

and hands his glorious ark to the Philistines.

He basically sent himself into exile because of his people's

sins. Yet even in the enemy's

territory, he secures victory over Israel's enemy.

He humiliates Dagon and all the Philistine gods, and he topples

their gods, and he brings the ark back to Israel without a

single Israelite soldier lifting a finger.

And then when Samuel gets older, the people begin to seek the

Lord, and Samuel gathers them in Mizpah for a worship of

repentance, sort of service of national repentance.

And just as they're turning back to God, the Philistines come and

they attack them, and the people cry out to Samuel, please don't

stop praying for us. Samuel then sacrifices a young

lamb, and then he raises his hand to the Lord God.

Please save us. And God thunders from heaven

roots the Philistine Philistines, and they scatter,

and there's victory that day. Somebody should make a movie

about that because it's awesome storytelling.

Really, really good. In the middle of all this, this

corruption, this exiles repentance, this divine

intervention, stands a righteous judge, Samuel, and the king who

fights for his people with Thunder God.

And this is where our passage begins.

First Samuel, Chapter 7, verse 15 to 822.

It's found on page 216 in the ESV Bible.

For a generation, about 20 years or so, Israel flourishes under

Samuel's leadership. He is their faithful judge.

And the circuit that he takes, that's written in verse 16 and

17, that's described there, it shows us the kind of judge that

he actually was. He goes to Bethel.

This is the place where God made a covenant with Jacob.

He goes to Gilgal. That's the other place where God

renews his covenant with Israel through circumcision after they

had crossed the Jordan, then at Mizpah, this most recent place

where the nation repented together and worshiped the Lord

together and God delivered them. And then it seems that it's

indicating that Samuel meets the people at important covenant

markers, places in their history that God met them.

And each of these places already had an altar.

But then Samuel builds an altar at another place, Rama, his own

hometown. The judge of Israel raised and

renewed altars that basically declared Yahweh is our king.

We are in covenant with Yahweh. And therein lies a very

important principle. The altars we raise are the ones

that we pay homage to silently, quietly, in our hearts reveal

the King that we serve. Every altar has a throne behind

it. We are either serving the true

King Jesus seated on his throne forever, or we are bowing down

to smaller kings who do not deserve our loyalty.

So today I want to talk about the altars that Israel built in

this chapter and the altars that we ourselves build and ask the

question, which king will you serve?

That's great. Pierce our hearts with your

Word, Heavenly Father, that we might be captivated by the glory

of Jesus Christ and surrender everything that we are to Him,

that we might be more like him in Christ's name.

Amen. Amen.

All right, so let's talk about false altars.

First. Chapter 8 happens about 20 years

after Chapter 7, and then in verse 4 you see that the elders

come to Samuel at Rama with a very reasonable request.

It seems they're concerned about succession.

Samuel is old, though in hindsight we know that he lives

for another 20-30 years. Later, 30 years more, he anoints

Saul. He tells Saul you've been

rejected when God tells him that his Kingdom has been taken from

him. He anoints David in the middle

of Saul's reign, and he still goes around on the circuit.

The elders, of course, don't know that.

That's understandable. But he is old.

But he's also appointed his two sons, Joel and Abijah, as judges

over the land. His sons were corrupt.

Joel, whose name it means Yahweh is God and Abijah, Yahweh is my

father, did not live as if Yahweh was their God and their

father. No, instead of reflecting God's

justice, these two acted as though they themselves were

gods, and they horrendously fathered the nation through

dishonest gain and perverted justice.

And so the elders say to Samuel, because you're old and because

your sons are evil. Now a point for us, the king, to

judge us like all the nations. And if you look at verse 20,

verse 20 actually fleshes out that request even more.

It says that we also may be like all the nations and that our

king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.

Now objectively speaking, asking for a king wasn't a bad thing.

In fact, if you read the the the law, God anticipates the king

for his people. He tells Abraham kings shall

come from you, and of Sarah he says kings of people will come

from her. Then you've got the Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy 17 · chapter mention

chapter 17 passage where God gives this Moses give this

stipulation to the people. He says when you come to the

land that the Lord your God has given you, you indeed may set a

king over you whom the Lord your God will choose.

And then at the beginning of this book for Samuel chapter 2,

verse 10, Samuel's mother Hannah prophesized in Saug before talk

of a king even started. He will give strength to his

king and exalt the horn of his anointed.

So it had always been in God's economy, God's plan for Israel

to have a visible king. That, of course, makes sense.

They had been ruled by judges all this while, local leaders

who held authority in certain sectors of the nation.

But the nation itself wasn't yet united under a single ruler.

So a desire for unity, for stability and leadership, it was

a good thing. Why then did their request

displease Samuel? What's going on here?

So verse 6 says Samuel prayed. I highly recommend prayer when

something displeases you. I know you guys do that anyway.

And it's in God's response that we find out something was off

with the elder's request, something was off.

This is where the false altars come in.

Israel had already built altars within themselves that revealed

the kind of king and the kind of judge that they were looking

for. And the first one was the altar

of idolatry. God says that Israel's request

for a king was actually a rejection of himself.

Look at verses 7 and 8. Obey the voice of the people in

all that they say to you, For they have not rejected you, but

they have rejected me from being king over them, according to all

the deeds that they have done from the day I brought them up

out of Egypt, even to this day, forsaking me and serving other

gods. So they are doing to you also.

Did you catch that? The desire for a king sprang up

from idolatry. Whatever revival they had

experienced 20 years ago at Mizpah had already eroded.

They'd forgotten, and Israel had drifted back to serving the gods

of the Philistines. And it's from that idolatry that

they asked for a king. So even though they were asking

for something that God himself had planned to give them one

day, they were serving at the altar of idolatry and not at the

altar of the Lord. The right question should have

been, Samuel, you are old, your sons are corrupt.

What does God want us to do? That's the right question.

Second altar, the altar of conformity.

They wanted to be like the nations.

Give us a king to judge us like all the nations.

And this wasn't just a rejection of Samuel as the judge because

he was currently their judge. Throwing some shade there on

Samuel or as God as their king was more than that.

It rejected Israel's unique calling as the covenant people

of God. They weren't supposed to be like

the other nations. That's what Leviticus tells us.

You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have

separated you from the peoples that you should be mine.

But Israel wanted to trade. That set apartness for

conformity. They wanted a king who would

rule them with Chariots and horses, in other words, to

return to the system of power in Egypt from which God has set

them free. And God warned them that this

particular type of imitation would lead to slavery.

The third altar, the altar of safety, or if you like, the

altar of fear and insecurity. We want a king who will go out

before us and fight our battles for us.

Fear was driving the request. A couple of chapters later,

chapter 12, verse 12, Samuel is giving his final address to the

people, and he says this. And when you saw that Nahash,

the king of the Ammonites came against you, you said to me, no,

but a king shall reign over us when the Lord your God was your

king. The looming threat of foreign

elements made them desperate for a permanent battle.

Ready king. And that's kind of ironic since

in the previous chapter, Chapter 7, God had displayed his power

at Mizpah and had gone before them and fought their enemy with

Thunder, scattered their enemy. But you see an invisible God who

fights on his own timetable, who wants their allegiance, who

wants their obedience, Someone they cannot control or see did

not appeal to their fearful, insecure hearts.

They preferred a king they could see.

They wanted visible assurance to combat their fears and

insecurity. These were the altars where the

Israelites worship the altar of idolatry, of conformity, of

safety, or if you like, fear and insecurity.

And that is why their request was evil in the sights of the

Lord. And so God says to Samuel, Now

then, obey their voice, only you shall solemnly warn them and

show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.

In other words, go ahead, Samuel, give them what they're

asking for, but first show them what kind of king grows out of

those false altars. Samuel delivers the warning.

It's painfully clear the kind of king they're asking for will be

a taker. He will take their sons for his

armies, take their daughters for his kitchens, take their fields,

vineyards, olive Groves, take a tithe.

Now a tithe is the language you use for something you give to

God. A tenth of their grain and

vineyards take a tithe of their flocks, and even take the people

themselves as servants for his officers.

And the king will also make them slaves, just like they were

slaves in Egypt. There are 7 warnings, 6 takes in

Samuel's response to the people. The king that they're asking for

will do exactly what Joel and Abijah were doing, perverting

justice and using power for gain.

Even more so, he would demand things that belong to God.

First the king would become their God.

And then in verse 18, in that day you will cry out because of

your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord

will not answer you. In that day, the king you want

will consume you. You will cry out to me, and I

will not answer you. And the people say that's fine,

give us a king anyway. Salma returns to the Lord in

grief reports. All of the people said.

And the Lord replies, Give the people what they want.

It's a sobering reality that God sometimes permits us to rebel,

that after he has warned us, he will give us what we demand even

when it isn't good for us. It's a sobering reality that we

often get the leaders we deserve, leaders who mirror the

altars of our own hearts. It's a sobering reality that

when we insist on a particular gift, we insist on the King that

we want. When it begins to consume us and

we cry out for help, that God might not answer, He might let

us feel the full weight of what we chose.

I know what it's like to serve a false king who takes.

I'm not talking about Dan. Those of you who know me, you

know that I love acting and directing and film.

I just, I love those things. I love storytelling.

And I think it's a good gift from the Lord.

But when I was in my late teens and well into my college years,

in my efforts to honor that gift, to fan it into flame, I

began to feed it without any discernment.

I exposed myself to everything related to acting in film.

And before long, I wasn't pursuing a calling.

I was pursuing A craving. I became addicted to the craft,

to the movies, to the stories, to the celebrities.

I would spend hours upon hours watching film after film, show

after show, trying to learn, to absorb, to grow in this thing

that I love to do. I exposed myself the things I

shouldn't have. There was inexorable pool to

entertainment itself. I became addicted to all sorts

of things, to video games and eventually to even darker

things, more unsavory forms of entertainment.

It stopped being about beauty, about the beauty of performance,

and became about finding meaning and purpose and escape and

valuing what I watch. Things that could never

satisfied me, the false king of entertainment and performance

took, took and took from me. It took my time, it took my

sleep, my joy, my mental stability, my health.

As an example, I kid you not, I watched the first five seasons

of 24 in eight Days. Yeah, that's not right.

That's just not right. It was that bad.

And of course it affected my relationships with people.

I couldn't love people the way I was supposed to because I wasn't

wow mentally and I put God in the back burner.

NEPA, the utility company in Nigeria, we call it NEPA.

They often take away the power. So we have bits of time when

there's absolutely no light at all.

I would be praying to the Lord God Almighty in the middle at at

eight, 8:00 PM when there's no light with kind of faithfully

praying because I just had my devotions and the the power

would come back and in the middle of a sentence, I'd rush

out and continue watching 24 and I'd forget that I was praying.

I was enslaved by His mercy. God confronted that false king

and He redeemed the passion that He gave me.

But every so often I still hear it crouching nearby, wanting to

consume me and to devour me. So if you ever wonder why I'm

hesitant to binge watch something, or to game with you,

or to just watch one more episode, it's because I know

what God saved me from. I'm aware now.

It's not wrong to desire good things from God, but make sure

you haven't built altars around that desire, altars of idolatry

and conformity and fear or safety or control or whatever

other altars there are. Because if your heart worships

at those altars, your request, no matter how good it sounds,

even if God wants to give it to you, will be evil in God's

sight. And the very gift you ask for

will consume you. Whether it's your job that

you're asking for, whether it's marriage, you're asking for a

sense of justice in our society, the safety you want.

All those things will consume you if you're worshipping at the

wrong altars. But there's another danger that

we need to watch out for from this passage.

Each of us has a potential to be a ruler who takes, and

unfortunately, I know what it's like to be a false king who

takes. I went to boarding school in

Nigeria for high school, and we had a system there where

students who were in 12th grade were elected as prefects and

given real authority to help organize and run the school with

the teachers and to enforce discipline.

That was a level of power that I don't think we're ready for.

I think we're too mature to handle that power.

I was the study prefect, which along with the other prefects,

gave me authority to, like I said, discipline, if you want to

be honest, to punish other students from the 7th grade to

my own peers, as long as they weren't prefects.

I couldn't punish another prefect, but I could punish my

own classmates. Yeah, it was weird.

By the time I was in 12th grade, though, there was a saving

grace. The school no longer allowed

prefects to flog and to beat other students.

There was a time that was permitted, but the forms of

punishment that remained were only limited by your creativity

and imagination. And if you were creative, they

could be brutal. One of my one of the ones that I

would never forget, one of my colleagues, one of my prefect

classmates, he made a whole class, kneeled down on the

concrete floor, each of them carrying one cinder block in

each hand, raised up like this until their hands were tired.

Why? Because they were whispering

during study prep. And you know, I kidded myself

that I was not as bad as the others.

I was a pastor's kid with the conscience.

Yes, I wielded power, but no, I had mercy.

I was merciful and just. But I know beyond the shadow of

a doubt that I misused my power. I treated fellow human beings as

less than myself. I enjoyed it.

I corrupted it because in the moment it felt so good to take.

So I ask you, you who are a ruler in your own right, you

have influence over others in some way or another.

How do you rule at work, at home, in your relationships?

Do you spend your days taking and taking and taking from those

you have power or influence over?

When your church family, your friends, your spouse, your

children, your parents look at you, do they feel refreshed by

your presence or drained by it? Do they sigh inwardly because

you're a taker, someone who steals their time, their peace,

their joy, their sense of safety, their patience?

Marriages suffer because spouses, one or both of them are

takers. Workplaces suffer because

leaders are takers. And some of you lead teams.

You supervise staff. You manage classrooms.

You manage households and projects and ministries.

Some of you serve on the Hill, in agencies, in advocacy, or in

uniform. Whatever your sphere of

influence, the question is the same.

Am I using my God-given authority to give or to take, to

advance integrity, truth and the common good, or to perpetuate

corruption and self-interest? Am I oppressing the very people

I am meant to serve such that they cry out to God as sons and

daughters with the Most High God call to reign with Christ?

We are all rulers. Do we take?

What do we give? It's a very important question

to answer because there is judgement for takers.

The Israelites got what they asked for.

The King who takes. Here's my favorite part.

The good news of the gospel is that God gives us a different

kind of king, the king who gives.

If you know me, I love the gospel.

I love the gospel and I see it in the story.

The Altars at Bethel, a Gilgal as Misbah and Rama, they all

point forward to another altar, the cross at Calvary, where the

true King gave and gave and gave and continues to give and give

and give. Jesus gave His life as a ransom

for many. His body was broken for us.

His blood was poured out for us. He gives His Spirit to dwell

within us and strengthen us. He gives His word and His

promises for our assurance. He gives His Kingdom for our

everlasting inheritance. At the cross of Calvary.

Jesus Christ sets us free from the altars of idolatry that once

held our hearts, so that we might see Yahweh as our true

King, reconciled, liberated from the modern modern Pagan gods of

our age at the cross of Calvary, Jesus Christ sets us free from

the altar of conformity. We are now a Kingdom of priest,

a royal nation to our God for His glory.

Therefore, as Paul says, we must no longer be conformed to the

pattern of this world. We must come out from among

them. We can't mirror them any longer

at the cross of Calvary. Jesus Christ sets us free from

fear and insecurity, from our constant desire to trust in the

honor of flesh, to save us from our Philistines.

No, we must not do that. Look, there's nothing wrong with

Chariots and horses and policies and activisms.

Those things are God that use it are things that God uses.

But a Psalm 20 declares some trust in Chariots, some trust in

horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.

For you see, God has exalted Jesus Christ to the highest

place. He has set his King on his

mountain and said this is my anointed, that in the name of

Jesus Christ every knee should bow under heaven and on earth,

and every tongue confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord to the

glory of God the Father. He is the King over everybody,

whether it be Pope Leo the 14th, Donald Trump, Muriel Bowser,

Archbishop Steve Wood, Glenn Youngkin, Wes Moore, Benjamin

Netanyahu, Somani, Megadi Zelensky, every president, Prime

Minister and ruler, all the leaders of the world at whatever

level of authority, and inevitably you and I serve at

the pleasure of King Jesus. He's exalted.

The King is exalted forevermore, and we all will be judged by how

we rule, by the King who gives. So fellow believers in the Lord

Jesus Christ and all who are yet to profess him as Lord, I

implore you to come to the greatest altar in history,

greater than Bethel or Gilgal or Mizpah or Rama, the altar at

Calvary, the cross of Jesus Christ, and surrender.

Surrender so that idolatry and conformity and fear and all the

other altars no longer control you, so that your heart is

aligned to serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling,

to kiss the Son and take refuge in him.

Which king will you serve? Let's pray.

You are exalted, You who are the King are exalted on high.

We will forever praise Your name and give You glory and honor.

Set our hearts, Lord Jesus, to look to King Jesus to turn away

from the altars that we are tempted to pursue.

The Christ might be glorified in US, and we will say with all of

our strength that Yahweh is our God and Father our King.

In your Son's name I pray. Amen.